my essay from Radio Silence,
issue 02, published earlier this year...
Even White Boys Get The Blues: Radiohead’s “Creep”
One of the late comedian Patrice O’Neal’s most watched videos on YouTube is a short radio interview he did on KITS San Francisco where he dissects the Radiohead song "Creep". He
wonders about the strange power “Creep” seems to have over white men of a
certain age, speculating that it digs deep into the confusion and angst of
Caucasian males in America, perhaps mining some rich seam of inadequacy,
helplessness, and loserdom. For O’Neal, “Creep” and the movie Fight Club are the holy grails of
contemporary American Whiteness. Black men, O’Neal says, don’t react to “Creep”
or Fight Club in this strange
obsessive way, but for young white males these two cultural
touchstones describe perfectly what it means to be a man in an increasingly
complicated, gender-neutral, multi-ethnic world.
I first saw Radiohead play“Creep” in September 1992 at The Venue Club in Oxford on the same night that parts of the music video were shot. I wasn’t that impressed with the group, who
I hadn’t heard of before and who seemed to be rather posh boarding school boys
completely out of step with the times. As many of us saw it back it then, real
music, authentic music, was the blue-collar stuff we were hearing from Seattle
bands such as Nirvana, who had triumphantly closed the Reading Festival a
couple of weeks prior. Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke came from different planets.
Cobain had been a homeless junkie who lived under a bridge in Aberdeen,
Washington, whereas it seemed that the worst thing that had ever happened to
Yorke was a bad experience with the bleach bottle in the hairdressing salon.
It wasn’t until I heard “Creep”
again a couple of months later on the BBC that I knew it was going to be a very
meaningful song in my life. The DJ said something about it being the “radio
edit,” so I went out and bought the single, closed the curtains of my
university digs, and listened to it on my Grundig hi-fi. The song begins with
Yorke’s whispered vocals:
When you were here before
Couldn’t look you in the eye
You’re just like an angel
Your skin makes me cry
You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You’re so fucking special
And
it’s at this point that Johnny Greenwood hits us with a wall of noise from two
open fret chords on his distorted electric guitar. The effect is jarring and
disconcerting, no matter how many times you hear it. As you’re still
recovering, Yorke’s scaldingly existential chorus cuts to the quick of all your
teenage/twenty-something/middle-aged angst:
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
Is
this a universal feeling? Almost certainly. One of Mark Twain’s best jokes was
to send a telegram to a dozen of his friends that said: “Flee at once. All is
discovered.” And of course, as Twain says, they did. When Steve Jobs passed
away, the headline in The Onion was
the apt: “Last Man in America to Know What the Fuck He Was Doing, Dies.” In
1978 Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes coined the term “imposter phenomenon” in a
paper in Psychotherapy Theory, Research
and Practice to describe women in graduate school or white-collar
professions who felt as though they were frauds. Healthy majorities of women in
every field felt this way, and subsequent studies found virtually the same
feeling among American men.
When “Creep” was released as a single in the U.S., it peaked at number two on
the Alternative Modern Rock chart, and the video went into heavy rotation on
MTV. The subsequent Radiohead album Pablo
Honey was something of a commercial flop in both the U.S. and U.K., and
Radiohead’s reputation was not cemented until their two ground-breaking mid-nineties
albums The Bends and OK Computer, both of which went multi-platinum.
Radiohead became famous for their intellectual, introspective sound and Yorke’s
plaintive, wailing vocals.
When I went to see Radiohead at Colorado’s
Red Rocks Amphitheatre in the summer of 2001, Rolling Stone was calling them “the biggest band in the world” and
the NME declared they were “the world’s
most important band.” Radiohead’s music was being discussed in serious
newspapers and by critics in highbrow venues such as The New Yorker. One thing missing from all this was “Creep.”
Somewhere around 1996, Thom Yorke grew sick of the song and so it vanished from
Radiohead’s set lists. Despite the pleas from crowds, Radiohead stopped playing
“Creep” completely, although occasionally Yorke would tease the audience by
humming a bar or two before launching into something else. At the 2001 Red
Rocks concert, Radiohead gave what was subsequently called one of their
greatest gigs, but of course “Creep” was absent, and I wasn’t the only one who
nudged through the traffic jam back to Denver feeling a little disappointed.
Yorke wrote “Creep” about a girl he
used to follow around at Exeter University. He was a funny-looking kid with a
skinny, asymmetric face, and the girl was unimpressed by his moody
introspection. He channelled his depression into the song, which was first composed
as an acoustic solo piece. The melody is not entirely original, and when it was
released as a single, credit was shared with Mike Hazelwood and Al Hammond who
wrote the Hollies’ song “The Air That I Breathe.” “Creep” was by no means the
first song to deal with social panic, but it was perhaps the first hit since
Peggy Lee’s 1969 “Is That All There Is?” to wear its existential colors on its
sleeve.
The second verse is even more
wrenching than the first:
I don’t care if it hurts
I want to have control
I want a perfect body
I want a perfect soul
I want you to notice
When I’m not around
You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
The
song ends with the girl, who Yorke had been staring at and stalking throughout,
running away from him in fear and disgust:
She’s running out the door
She’s running out
She runs, runs, runs…
Whatever makes you happy
Whatever you want
You’re so fucking special
I wish I was special
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong here
The genius of “Creep” is
identifying this common anomie. We’ve
all been to that place (the Pitts and Clooneys aside), that moment when our
object of desire rejects us, often in a public and humiliating manner. We’ve
all felt that the game is rigged against us and the world belongs to a club of
the rich and powerful, a club we will never be permitted to join. “Creep” is a
song for the kid in the corner with his hoodie up, not sporty enough to hang
out with the jocks, not geeky enough to fit in with the nerds. That kid grew up
and became us.
Perhaps as Yorke won more accolades and
got more praise from hangers on, he grew uncomfortable singing “Creep.” He
didn’t feel like a creep anymore, and he felt like a phoney when he sang it. That changed in the late summer of
2001. My wife and I were in London when we heard that Radiohead were performing
a special show for their hometown crowd at South Park in Oxford. Like thousands
of ticketless others we took the train there, climbed over the inadequate
temporary security fencing and watched the concert in the light English
drizzle.
It was perhaps because of this rain
that during a second encore there was an equipment failure and Radiohead were
unable to play the song from the album Kid
A which they had rehearsed. Yorke turned to Johnnie Greenwood and asked,
“Es ist kaput, yah?” Without waiting for a response, he launched into “Creep,”
to the amazement and delight of the crowd.
Steven Dalton of the NME described what happened next:
“Everybody within thirty miles of Oxford sings along, soaked to the bone,
bonding in the Biblical downpour that even Thom Yorke was powerless to prevent
because Radiohead are not gods; but for these two hours, at least, they were
godlike.” Since then the song has
rotated in and out of Radiohead set lists but it is always a crowd favourite
and it always will be. Solace for an alienated teenager picked on at school,
solace for a middle-aged man passed over for promotion, solace for someone
stood up on a date.
African-American musical heritage is
so rich that a band like Radiohead seems unnecessary for black American males. It
was with wry amusement that Patrice O’Neal would watch his white friends freeze
and get very quiet when “Creep” came on the radio. For comedic purposes, he
pretended not to know why, but like all good observers of the human condition,
he knew that there was no real mystery about it: Everyone gets quiet when they’re
playing your song.
